Question if Fregoli Syndrome and Prosopagnosia is related

Post Reply New Topic

Are Fregoli Syndrom (Mostly called Fregoli delusion) and Prosopagnosia related? When I had profound symptoms of Prosopgnosia, I had a belief that all people are the same, until my social skills got improved.

Last edited by FranzOren on 18 Jun 2022, 9:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

Perhaps they could be related in some way.

It’s not called Fregoli Syndrome; there’s something called “Fregoli Delusion”—which is the belief that many people are actually one person who puts on different “disguises.”

It's called Fregoli delusion, but some psychologist call it Fregoli Syndrome.

How the heck could they be "related"?

Theyre opposite things that arent even the same category of conditions.

Prosopagnosia means that you dont distinquish faces (comparable to dyslexia, or innumeracy). And this causes social problems for you.

Fregoli Syndrome is a psychotic delusion akin to paranoia in which you DO recognize individual faces like a normal person can, but are convinced that the individual faces are all disguises being put on by one person.

I had related fixed, false belief throughout my childhood and teenage years.

Sounds like you were paranoid, or something along those lines.

If you have prosopagnosia (aka "face blindness") then you are like a certain person who posted on WP some years ago who would watch reruns of the original Star Trek, and couldnt tell Checkov from Sulu because "they are both dark haired guys with similar hair cuts". When most folks would immediately see that the two Enterprise crewmen "are not even of the same race", much less look alike.

Another WP person explained how they once got lost in a building, and would have to ask directions of successive people. And it turned out that the successive ladies she kept asking were "the same person". She would go in circles, and then bother the same person again and again not realizing that it was the same person because she was face-blind.


Most folks are wired to zero in on faces (it as if your brain switches to finer grain film, or to smaller pixels, on a human face than it uses on the rest of the landscape). Folks with prosopagnosia seem to lack that special brain circuitry, and thus dont lock in to the fine differences between human faces.

If you have Fregoli than you have no trouble telling Nicholas cage from John Travolta, but you're convinced that John Travolta IS Nicholas Cage with a lifelike replica of John Travolta's face deliberately put on the front of his head. And that that you're living in the movie "Face-off" for real. Not the same thing.

Now that makes sense.

I think that Prosopagnosia should be called Facial Misidentification Syndrome, because you misidentify faces often.

Last edited by FranzOren on 23 Jun 2022, 6:45 am, edited 1 time in total.

You’re not necessarily “misidentifying.”

In extreme cases, you are not “identifying” al all.

What does that mean then?

Misidentification implies mistaking one person for another.

If you can’t distinguish faces at all, you’re not even identifying the face.

If you have a milder form of the disorder, then you might misidentify a person.

Now that makes sense. Thank you!